A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

lead to the man’s death. Relevant events which lead to this downfall are strategically
marked by the role reversing suffix -n. -n on the verb conversing marks the fatal
circumstance from which the whole ordeal originates. -n on the noun place marks the
relevance of the place where the man returned after three years to pay his bill. -n on the
verb ate marks the narrator’s imposed point of view that trouble is coming (since the man
at the time would not have known that these were fatal circumstances). And finally, -n
on the conjunction so-being ‘then’ marks that it is the woman’s son speaking up which
leads to the eventual trouble.
What is striking about the use of -n, is that it also has a grammatical function in low-
level structure (i.e. sentence level) showing contrast, much like the English but. This is
shown below.
(16) Grammatical function of suffix -n (from Longacre 1976:472)
His father him to work ask (-n), the boy refused.
‘His father asked him to work but the boy refused.’
The use of -n at the sentence level affirms the observed tendency for discourse markers in
English (and as we will see, in Ojibwe as well) that some items which have a primary use
grammatically (i.e. in the ideation plane of discourse), may also be used as discourse
markers, above the sentence level.
Ojibwe makes a contribution here as well, in that, it further expands the pool of
candidate markers to include both SECOND POSITION DISCOURSE MARKERS (supporting
claims for Yagua above), and PREVERBS (which include prefix-like words which act like
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